Shrinking Population in China Brightens the Climate Outlook

Shrinking Population in China Brightens the Climate Outlook

The world has yet to apprehend the tectonic shift that will occur as China’s population starts to decline. That long-anticipated event did not occur in 2020, according to official data, but it will probably occur soon. From a climate perspective, the population decline is good news, since fewer people means lower emissions. As with many of the uncertainties surrounding the planet’s future, it’s hard to foresee the exact carbon impact from population decline.

China’s population has been aging rapidly, and policy makers there had hoped that ending the one-child policy in 2016 would encourage more births. The country’s birthrate, however, has not risen and remains well below the level required to increase the population — probably because the one-child rule lasted so long as to create a new norm, and because income in the country has been rising. In 2020, the pandemic may have also depressed fertility rates.

Low fertility rates inevitably will cause China’s population to fall. In 2017, China’s State Council projected that the country’s population would peak in 2030. Last year, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a study projecting that the decline would instead start in 2027. News reports supposedly based on Chinese census data suggested the